The Difference Between Mistakes and War Crimes

"From this moment, airstrikes on the houses of people are not allowed. Afghanistan is an ally, not an occupied country. And our treatment with NATO is from the point of view of an ally. If it turns to the other, to the behaviour of an occupation, then of course the Afghan people know how to deal with that. History is a witness how Afghanistan deals with occupiers." Afghan President Hamid Karzai

That's abundantly clear. President Karzai stands on the cusp of demanding that NATO and ISAF forces leave his country. This, of course, is the man who owes his current position to the presence of NATO and ISAF forces. Without their presence, the Taliban which had occupied the governing position of Afghanistan to the horror of ordinary Afghans for whom their reign was a nightmare, would still be present, governing.

President Karzai at one point made the rounds, visiting the capitals of the countries who positioned their troops in his country, thanking them and urging them to continue their presence in Afghanistan, as protectors of his people who advanced the future prospect of a fully functioning, civil government. Those very same countries who invested hugely in needed civil infrastructure, in providing the expertise in training for the country's civil service, judiciary, medical clinics, schools.

The Taliban have proven to be resilient and determined beyond expectations. NATO and ISAF forces have suffered many losses on behalf of their commitment to Afghanistan. Their treasuries have been looted by their governments to assist Afghanistan out of its poverty-stricken state, in an attempt to assist the government to become truly viable and dependable, enlarging its presence in the provinces.

The Afghan civilian casualties that have so enraged President Karzai are an unfortunate by-product of war. And war is what is ongoing in Afghanistan, as President Karzai well knows.Yet it is not NATO that is primarily responsible for the majority of the civilian casualties; it would appear that those of a lesser number than occur with Taliban attacks on the populace, are what infuriate President Karzai, not those for which the Taliban are responsible. Airstrikes target houses when the Taliban take refuge and attack from those houses.

"The insurgents have repeatedly fired on medical evacuation aircraft, carried out suicide attacks in bazaars full of Afghan women and children and this week attempted to use an Afghan ambulance as a suicide vehicle bomb", according to Rear Admiral Vic Beck, NATO's director of public affairs. Before NATO attacks take place, Afghan representatives of the army, the police and the intelligence services are alerted and consulted.

President Karzai is a man totally conflicted; he needs the presence of Western forces, yet he agonizes at the concept that non-Muslim Westerners are at war with his ethnic and religious counterparts, even as their obvious agenda is to obliterate his own government and restore their version of Islamist governance. Which was hideously oppressive, massively inhumane, restricting the lives and the futures of Afghans beyond belief.

In the pursuit of their goal, the Taliban enlist whoever they can, teens, women, recalcitrant, coerced young men, mentally unstable individuals, to become suicide bombers. They have been successful in infiltrating the ranks of the Afghan military and the Afghan national police, so occasionally those in uniform have been able to inflict death upon unsuspecting Westerners, as well as Afghan leaders.

Hamid Karzai insists on an end to the airstrikes targeting Taliban strongholds. Yet those airstrikes have been hugely successful in destroying those strongholds and in putting senior Taliban out of commission. The Taliban are fully engaged in terrorism; civilian deaths in Afghanistan last year were by the United Nations as having reached 2,777, 75% of which were attributable to Taliban attacks.

The Taliban destroy schools, threaten schoolchildren for attending schools, and threaten farmers if they attempt to grow edible agricultural crops other than poppies. They deliberately target civilians in their attacks to ensure that they are feared by the populace who will then not co-operate with NATO forces. So it seems that it ill behooves President Karzai to threaten to cast out NATO forces from his country.

Fact is, they'd be delighted to go, lock, stock and barrel.